Read My Mind
by fiona249
Summary: Based off Read My Mind by The Killers. About Lisbon's past and how it screwed her up, and the effects on her relationship with Jane now. Mentions of child abuse, sex and suicide.


_On the corner of Main Street_

_Just trying to keep it in line_

_You say you want to move on and_

_You say I'm falling behind_

_Can you read my mind?_

**PRESENT**

"Don't walk away from me," Jane grabbed her shoulder as she tried to keep walking. "That's all you've been doing all day."

"We're in public. Stop it."

"Right, because I hate making scenes," Jane said sarcastically. "If you don't turn around and talk to me, we'll do this back at the CBI."

Teresa's shoulders slumped, and she wheeled around, defeated. "Jane, you son of a bitch. Are you threatening to wreck my career?"

"You've been ignoring me," Jane persisted. In the light of the sunny Californian day he looked strangely angelic, his blonde hair shining. It was only when he tilted his head slightly forwards, so that shadows darkened his blue eyes, that she could see the ruthlessness in him. His entire body was taught, despite his calm façade, and she knew instinctively that he was on edge. Perhaps she was learning from him, after all.

"Dammit, Jane, of course I've been ignoring you!" Lisbon hissed. "I want to move on. I told you, we're over. Do your Jedi mind-trick all you like – it's the truth. I don't want you anymore. We have nothing left to talk about."

"Really?" When she turned her head to the side to check again if there was anyone she knew on this street, he leaned in and kissed the spot on her neck that turned her to jelly. He knew her body too well – he could have her moaning and desperate in minutes. In a way that angered her more than anything else – that absolute lack of control.

She hadn't made the decision for them to start sleeping together. In a way, neither of them had. Alcohol and the resulting poor judgment had done the trick. Then he just kept coming back, showing up at her door smiling and sexy, never even slightly concerned that she'd say no. And she hadn't, of course. They'd comforted each other and satisfied each other and damn if it hadn't been good.

"Bite me," Lisbon said coldly, pulling away from him even as her legs weakened. From the slight smirk on his face, she knew he'd noticed her reaction.

She honestly couldn't help it. Sometimes, lying awake at night, she wondered what drew her to him so helplessly. It was nothing to do with his looks or his charm, that was for certain. Lisbon had watched him use those as a shield and as weapons before, and she knew just how meaningless those parts of him were. How surface. In fact, she was fairly certain it was the dangerous side that drew him to her.

Or maybe she just liked pain.

Jane sighed, as if her response was an expected irritation. "Lisbon, please. You don't want to stop sleeping with me."

"You read my mind, did you?" Lisbon snarled, her anger reaching breaking point. She hadn't had the slightest bit of control in their relationship (or whatever it was) since that fifth shot of tequila had made nudity seem a good idea. Now he wouldn't even let her control when she wanted to leave. Well, screw him. "You're dead wrong."

Jane was used to physical and verbal and even emotional attacks from her. He was used to taking everything she could throw at him, including staplers. But as he stared at her now, an unfamiliar panic took hold of him. She was serious, and yet she wasn't.

It was in the twitch of her lips, the bluish bruises under her eyes, the strangeness of the stance. Jane broke through all his preconceived notions (had he gotten too close to read her objectively anymore? How had that happened?) and treated her like a stranger.

The woman in front of him wanted to be happy, but all she knew how to do was punish herself. That's what she'd been doing with him – hurting herself because she wanted more than she thought he could give. In pain, because for her this was about emotions now, and all she'd ever understood was physical.

Teresa Lisbon wanted Jane gone, because she thought he couldn't love her. Because she knew he'd hurt her, tear her to pieces.

Jane stared at her, honestly shocked at this idea. Of course, he hadn't – but he'd thought – didn't she know? He couldn't say he loved her while he wore the wedding ring that another woman had slipped on his finger. He couldn't understand this new love, this second chance, and Jane knew that it would be long time before he could talk about it or even face it. Too long.

For the first time ever, he wished she knew all his tricks herself. Then Lisbon could have hypnotised him or cold-read him or something, _anything_, to understand that it had never been just about sex. To understand the things he couldn't say, had never been able to say.

But she didn't have those skills, so she just walked away.

* * *

><p><em>I never really gave up on<em>

_Breaking out of this two star town_

_I got the green light, I got a little fight_

_I'm gonna turn this thing around_

_Can you read my mind?_

**PAST**

Teresa Lisbon learned what love was when she was eight years old.

Well, actually she mainly learned about disappointment.

She'd had a vague idea about it before. It was not getting a piece of cake at a birthday party, or not getting what you wanted for Christmas, or not being able to ride the ponies at the fair. But then when she was eight, she saw absolute disillusionment on her father's face when she walked down the stairs one night to get a drink of water. As soon as she saw her parents, she froze, ducking down so they couldn't see her.

He was pacing, his hands flying up to clutch at his hair. The coiled tension in his body scared her. "Dammit," he swore. At eight years old, Teresa thought that was the worst swearword imaginable. "I didn't get it."

Her mother was sitting at the kitchen table quietly. "Sweetie, we knew it was a long shot," she said in her sweet, well-modulated voice. "You've only been working here a few years."

"Mikey promised me he'd put a good word in," her father raged. "After I saved his arse, he owes me. I wanted that job. He promised!" He seemed to crumple then. "I'm so sorry, love. So sorry. All I ever wanted to do was give you the life you need – you deserve -"

"I don't need anything else," her mother said firmly, standing up. "I have you."

"I'm not worth it," he muttered.

Teresa's mother lifted a hand to his head, as if in absolution. "You are. You are."

It was years before Teresa Lisbon learned the whole story. Her mother had been from a well-off family, her father from a group of poor drunks. He'd promised her a lot and never gotten any of it, but he'd also never stopped trying. She was what made him try – she got him out of bed in the morning, gave him a reason to try, gave him a reason to put effort in. Because as long as he tried, she'd love him. So he tried to be the best father, the best husband, the best fireman in the world for her.

Even at the time, though, Teresa understood the importance of what she was watching. She understood what it meant to love someone – that they made you the best you could be. She didn't understand that when you love someone that much, the fallout from losing them is inevitable. A kind of torture that never ends.

She didn't understand until her mother died, and her father stopped trying to get promoted to a city area. Stopped trying to be a good father. Stopped drinking in moderation. Stopped all of the things he'd done because he loved his wife so very much.

She didn't understand until she next saw that coiled tension in her father. Right before he slapped her hard across the face, skewing her notions of love and finally killing her innocence.

* * *

><p><em>The good old days, the honest man,<em>

_The restless heart, the promised land_

_The subtle kiss that no one sees_

_A broken wrist and a paid trapeze_

**PAST**

Teresa Lisbon had her first boyfriend when she was fourteen. Back when her father was still alive, and dangerous with it.

His name was Clint but even despite that he wasn't exactly prime boyfriend material. He was sixteen, skinny and tall, with dark hair. He frowned a lot and tried hard not to smile because he wanted to be serious.

Teresa eventually got with him because he had a car, and even then the idea of escape was so attractive that she craved it like a drug.

Truthfully, at first she didn't even notice him. He would stare at her in the hallways at school, taking in her bruised arms and her patched clothes. One day he sauntered over, smirking, and asked her out, planning for a few weeks of necking before he moved on. She said no.

Her absolute disinterest stunned him. He was sixteen, he had a car, he was even in a band! What was wrong with her?

What was wrong was that Teresa knew exactly what men were like by then – or thought she did, anyway. In her mind they were vicious dogs on a chain. When the chain was taken away, they would hurt people and not even care. Her mother had been her father's chain, as insulting as that seemed. The men who her father brought back from the pub sometimes were off their chains. In her mind, as soon as there were no eyes on Clint, he would be the same.

So she turned him down, again and again. Until one day when she was walking as fast as possible down the street, in a baggy jumper, and she saw him cruise by in his car. Teresa raised her left arm and he stopped instantly, leaping out, boyish excitement written all over his face. Then he got a closer look and saw her tears.

"Tess? What happened?"

She wanted to tell him not to call her Tess, that only her brothers could call her Tess. She wanted to tell him she didn't need him. She wanted to make him drive on, because this was a secret she couldn't tell, but the pain was too great. She didn't have a choice.

"I've broken my right wrist," she said slowly and painfully, "I'm walking to hospital."

He looked horrified, but also impressed. "Get in," he said, so she did.

On the way there he drove slowly so he wouldn't jerk her arm with the movements of the car, and at the same time pelted her with questions. "Why isn't your Dad driving you? How did you break your wrist? Why didn't you phone an ambulance?"

Teresa said she'd fallen out of a tree. Her brothers were at a friend's house, her father was at a meeting, the ambulance line was busy. They were decent lies, memorised, used before. Clint didn't believe a word of them.

When they finally pulled into the hospital, she begged him not to come in with her. He did, of course, and stood by silently and grim-faced as she lied about her name and age and everything under the sun to the doctor, who smiled and told her it would all be okay. And when asked, he backed it all up.

"Your Dad did this, didn't he?" he said on the way home, slowly. As if the realisation was so big he couldn't come to terms with it. Teresa ignored him completely, and used her good arm to wind down the window so she could feel the breeze. She couldn't remember the last time her father had been sober enough to drive her anywhere. "It's okay, I won't tell anyone."

After a second, Teresa turned to look at him. Then, careful not to bang her wrist, she leant over and gave him a light kiss on the cheek. It was the first time she'd ever kissed a man who wasn't related to her, even on the cheek.

In her mind, that was it – the kiss was payment for everything he'd done. She didn't have any feelings for him. Sometimes she wondered if her father had killed her capacity to feel like that.

The next night, though, she dreamed of the wind. And it occurred to her that even though she could never love Clint, she did love the freedom he could give her. So the next day, she went up to him and kissed him for real.

They dated for five and a half months, and for every single Friday of that time, he would let her and her brothers pile into his crappy car and drive them away from the hell that they'd go through if they were there when her father got back. They would go to some stupid park and hang around, far enough away that her drunken father couldn't hurt any of them.

It was the best escape she could manage, then.

* * *

><p><em>It's funny how you just break down<em>

_Waiting on some sign_

_I pull up to the front of your driveway_

_With magic soaking my spine_

_Can you read my mind?_

**PRESENT**

Jane parked his car, breathing deeply. Right. He had to go in.

It was so hard, though, knowing she was in there. What would he say? She would think he was there for sex, and right now he didn't have the words to convince her he wasn't. Strange to think that he didn't have the words, when sometimes it seemed all he ever had was words.

He also wondered if it would be a lie. Some buried, reptilian part of his brain, the animalistic part of him, did want to go in there for sex. To touch her and convince her and make her see that she wanted it too. And then they would be rolling in the sheets together, sweaty and hot, and Jane would forget everything that he wanted to forget. His wife and daughter would disappear from his memory as he sunk into her, his terrible mistakes vanish, and the darkness in him would go too. For a while he'd just be a man with a woman.

But of course, after that time it would be over. And then he'd be lying there slightly more alone than he was before as Lisbon drew further away from him. The way she'd been doing since the first time they kissed and she felt something more then she should.

Jane closed his eyes and pictured her. The mulish set of her mouth, the emerald green of her eyes, her dark hair probably damp from a shower. She'd be wearing her old baggy jersey, the one that made her legs look much longer then seemed physically possible for such a petite woman. Lisbon would probably spit some insults at him and try and slam the door in his face. Because she loved him.

It was less of a realisation, more of an acknowledgement. As if Jane had always been aware of it, so the revelation should have been expected. Shouldn't have been a shock, and yet it was somehow. He'd always known there was something between them, and then he'd taken it a step further and made her love him and he was shocked that anyone could love him. He understood what she thought – that he would die, or go to jail, and that she would end up hurting and alone. But it didn't have to be that way. Did it?

How strange that she loved him.

And he loved her, too, but he didn't know if he could say it. Ever. He'd only said it seriously to one woman in his life, and now that memory was twisted up with the memory of her in a bloody heap, her nails painted with her own blood.

Nevertheless, he straightened his shoulders, took a deep breath, and stepped out of the car. Jane walked up to her door and knocked three times.

* * *

><p><em>The teenage queen, the loaded gun,<em>

_The drop dead dream, the chosen one_

_A southern drawl, a world unseen_

_City wall and a trampoline_

**PAST**

Teresa Lisbon touched a gun for the first time when she was sixteen.

It was three days after her birthday. Her class had thrown her a party, but no one expected to go to her house for any kind of celebrations, since everyone had heard talk of what went on there. Screams and the sounds of violence, with her drunken father occasionally stumbling out to the yard to throw up or wet himself.

It had been a particularly bad one the night before. Her father had been in a good mood about something when he got back, but it hadn't lasted long. He'd tried to assault Tommy, the most rebellious of them, when the boy taunted him into a rage. As always, Teresa managed to deflect most of the damage onto herself. She sported a black eye that she would later claim was from tripping down the stairs.

She tiptoed into her father's room to check that he was okay. The boys always tried to dissuade her from checking, knowing that if he woke up he might still be drunk from the night before and be angry about her snooping. Even if he was sober then, he might remember it the next time he got drunk.

But Teresa couldn't leave him in there alone. She went through stages of hating her father and pitying him, but she always had the memories her brothers were too young to have – her father teaching her to ride a bike, helping her with her maths homework, letting her dance on his feet.

This time, though, something was different. She spotted it as soon as she entered the room. There was a curved, dark piece of metal lying on the bed beside her unconscious father, the sun gleaming off it. Moving closer, she picked it up.

It was a gun.

Teresa expected it to have some kind of malevolence attached to it, but it didn't. Instead it was all smooth metal, almost comforting in its weight and grip. Avoiding the trigger, she pulled up one of the metal bits that she was fairly sure covered the bullets. There they were, all of them. Bullets. The gun was loaded.

Teresa thought about how Tommy could wander in here and find this, take it out to show his friends. It would be so easy for someone to get accidentally hurt. After this, she had to put it somewhere higher – after all, she didn't know how to remove bullets. What if there was some sort of special way to take them out, and she did it wrong? So she got a chair, stood on it, and put the gun on the top shelf where no one but their father could reach it.

Surprisingly, when her father saw what she'd done, he approved. He probably didn't want one of them to shoot at him.

Three weeks later, in a rage, he nearly shot Teresa with the gun. He was so drunk he missed, but it was still very close. She lay on the ground sobbing, the absurd thought going through her panicked mind that the gun hadn't hurt her because it liked her.

It proved it didn't like her father that same night.

Teresa didn't remember much of the next few weeks. She was in shock. They were taken to the city, stuck in a home for orphans temporarily till the courts could sort it out. A kind man with a deep drawling accent ran the place. He kept trying to talk to Teresa, get her to open about what had happened. As if it made a difference. Her father was dead.

It was one day, watching Tommy play on the tiny trampoline that was the only toy provided there, that Teresa finally spoke about what happened. It was something about the rhythm of the springs, they way the light gleamed off it in a way so similar to the gun.

"I'm glad," she said to the man, with his deep voice and big ears and shocked expression. "I'm glad he's dead." And it was the truth. She was grateful to her father for making it so he could never hurt them again, and she was grateful to the gun for taking away his pain. Not that she ever admitted that about the gun, of course. It would have sounded insane.

It was, after all, just a piece of metal.

* * *

><p><em>Slipping in my faith until I fall<em>

_You never returned that call_

_Woman open the door, don't let it sting_

_I want to feel that fire again!_

**PRESENT**

Teresa Lisbon poured herself another glass of wine, ignoring the blinking on her answer phone. She knew who it was. Jane again, saying how they "needed to talk". How stupid.

It occurred to her again to wonder again what had attracted her to Jane. The biggest loves of her life had both been dark haired, solid men. She remembered someone telling her she was trying to date someone like her father.

Of course, she hadn't been. Neither of them had been big drinkers nor even slightly abusive. Well, not physically abusive, anyway. Emotionally, sometimes.

Tim had been the first one, an ambulance man who got frequently depressed about his work, especially after his older sister died in an accident. Eventually he'd ended up on so many pills it was like trying to have a conversation with a tranquillised horse. Of course Saint Teresa had still stuck with him – until he was finally admitted to an institution. On his way in, he told her not to wait for him, and she'd followed his advice. As far as she knew he was still there fifteen years later.

Grant had been a policemen. Five years later, when she was well over Tim, she'd fallen for him and had a brief tempestuous relationship with him. His previous girlfriend had died of cancer, ironically at the hospital where her last love Tim had worked. She'd never told him that. Grant had been passionate but mercurial, and she'd yearned to make him better. But then one night they'd had a fight about something stupid and she'd stormed out – God, to be young again and just storm out every time something went wrong, so dramatic and simple – refusing to come back. She'd heard from a friend of a friend that he'd died four years ago, hanged himself after throwing away all his money on an investment that didn't work out. The friend, a scurrilous gossip, had also added that his suicide letter was to the girl he'd loved who had died of cancer, but she doubted that was true. Too Romeo-esque.

Lisbon frowned. Suddenly it sounded… strange… to realise where her former boyfriends had ended up. There was a pattern here.

Jane was mercurial, difficult, and self-destructive, mourning a loss he could never get over. The same could be said about Tim or Grant.

The same could be said about her father.

_Self-destructive_… so she _had_ fallen into the abused child's trap, of falling for men who reminded her of the person who'd hurt her most. About the best that could be said about her relationships with Grant and Tim was that she'd gotten out before they'd completely self-destructed. More from luck than judgment, really, if she was honest.

Saint Teresa, trying to fix the unfixable. Her mouth curved into a humourless smile. Trying to finally get it right, this time, the way she couldn't the first time. How melancholy, and utterly, utterly pathetic. And just what she was doing with -

_BANG, BANG, BANG._

Lisbon jerked, nearly spilling her wine as she heard the knocks on the door. Automatically, she walked over and opened it. "Jane," she said, feeling exhausted. "Of course."

Whatever Jane saw in her eyes – perhaps her misery, her confusion at what she'd just realised; perhaps the years she'd sacrificed to save other people, to fix them; perhaps even just the love that he felt for her too – it gave him the words he needed. And after all, hadn't they been simple all along?

"I love you," Jane said straightforwardly, "And I'm not going to hurt you."

And he pulled her into his arms.

* * *

><p><em>The stars are blazing like rebel diamonds<em>

_Cut out of the sun_

_Can you read my mind?_

**PAST**

"It's a beautiful night tonight," Jane sang out, staring up at the sky admiringly. "Stars everywhere. So bright, don't you love the country? This is such a pretty area. All this sand."

The dark-haired woman stared at him disbelievingly. "It's a crime scene, Mr Jane. It's not pretty, it's gory."

"Yes, but such a great view!" Jane hummed to himself annoyingly.

His partner closed her eyes and counted to ten before replying. "Some respect, please. These are the remains of a human being. Show some compassion."

"I know you don't like me," Jane said to the cop he'd been permanently assigned to from now on. He'd only met her today, and already she'd threatened him with bodily harm more than once. "I can read your mind."

"Good for you," Teresa Lisbon crouched, sifting through the sand, looking for any more clues. "Good for me, too. That way I don't have to swear out loud anymore."

Patrick Jane rolled his eyes. "So unrelentingly negative. You know you'll learn to love me eventually."

And he was right.

* * *

><p><strong>Did it work out? Or did it end as badly as all her other relationships? Eh, I don't have a clue. Maybe. This was just fun to write.<strong>


End file.
